kilometer
noun
How do you pronounce kilometer?: Usage Guide
In North American speech kilometer is most often pronounced with primary stress on the second syllable. This pronunciation is also heard frequently in British speech. Those who object to second syllable stress say that the first syllable should be stressed in accord with the stress patterns of centimeter, millimeter, etc. However, the pronunciation of kilometer does not parallel that of other metric compounds. From 1828 to 1841 Noah Webster indicated only second syllable stress, and his successor added a first syllable stress variant in the first Merriam-Webster dictionary of 1847. Thus, both pronunciations are venerable. Most scientists use second syllable stress, although first syllable stress seems to occur with a higher rate of frequency among scientists than among nonscientists.
Did you know?
A kilometer is equal to about 62/100 of a mile, and a mile is equal to about 1.61 kilometers. The U.S. has been slow to adopt metric measures, which are used almost everywhere else in the world. Though our car speedometers are often marked in both miles and kilometers, the U.S. and Great Britain are practically the only developed nations that still show miles rather than kilometers on their road signs. But even in the U.S., footraces are usually measured in meters or kilometers, like the Olympic races. Runners normally abbreviate kilometer to K: "a 5K race" (3.1 miles), "the 10K run" (6.2 miles), and so on.
Examples of kilometer in a Sentence
Natalie Wong, Fortune, 26 Apr. 2024
In a previous study, researchers showed that many Avars buried in Hungary around 600 C.E. shared ancestry with people buried in Mongolia just a few decades earlier, implying a long-distance migration that covered more than 7000 kilometers in the space of a generation.
—Byandrew Curry, science.org, 24 Apr. 2024
The powerful missiles have a range up to 300 kilometers (about 187 miles) and allow Ukraine to strike the Russian military throughout Crimea and in occupied parts of eastern Ukraine that had been difficult to reach.
—Courtney Kube, NBC News, 24 Apr. 2024
However, this means that the buoys have to be within 50 kilometers of the shore, in the case of a reference station.
—IEEE Spectrum, 22 Apr. 2024
Most of these cups are made within 10 kilometers of where they’ll be sold and used, a circular model GaeaStar plans to replicate to some degree.
—Jaina Grey, WIRED, 22 Apr. 2024
The 2023 wildfire season saw 5000 square kilometers (the same size as London, Paris, and Berlin combined) burned, per the report; Greece suffered the largest wildfire (from July to August 2023) ever recorded in the European Union, impacting 960 square kilometers.
—Charisma Madarang, Rolling Stone, 22 Apr. 2024
Voyager 1 is currently about 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) away, and at 46 years old, the probe has shown multiple quirks and signs of aging in recent years.
—Cnn.com Wire Service, The Mercury News, 22 Apr. 2024
The island is part of the Federated States of Micronesia, a Pacific nation between the Philippines and Hawaii that is made up of more than 600 islands scattered across about 2.5 million square kilometers of ocean.
—Brad Lendon, CNN, 11 Apr. 2024
These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'kilometer.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.
Dictionary Entries Near kilometer
Cite this Entry
“Kilometer.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/kilometer. Accessed 30 Apr. 2024.
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kilometer
noun
kil-ˈäm-
Medical Definition
kilometer
noun
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